When the Sahara is not an option: The best ways to dry out a cell phone

Video evidence that we will try pretty much anything to save a wet phone.

Cell phones and moisture are, to put it in the nicest of terms, sworn mortal enemies. If you can't tell a story where you dropped your phone and it shattered to pieces, chances are you have one where you spilled, splashed, or trickled water on it, or dropped it in a puddle, sink, or pool... or best of all, a toilet.

Folklore and actual science have offered solutions to the problem of the wet cell phone over the last couple of decades, from toasting it gently in the oven to burying it in some rice to buying special drying environments for it. While we’ve had various amounts of success with these different methods, we decided to give them a real, semi-scientific trial run on a few different phones to see how they dealt with a serious immersion scenario.

A few caveats: we used four different phones, one for each drying environment we tested. Obviously, different body designs will take on water differently, but we submerged each one until all the air had appeared to escape from the interior. Likewise, different designs may dry out differently, and water may have an easier time clinging to some nooks and crannies.

Since a wet phone is a Defcon 1 situation in the context of device disasters, we didn't give the phones a specific time frame to dry out—if your phone is wet and you want it back, it’s in your best interest to give it as much time as you possibly can. We checked in on each phone after one day; those that were still wet were given an extra day. You can certainly dry them even longer.

Lastly, even if your phone appears to be working again after cooling its heels a while in a desert-dry place, that doesn’t mean water isn’t still in there working its long-term magic to corrode the various parts of the phone. Above all things, give it time, make sure it’s dry, and maybe never feel completely safe that there isn’t some lingering moisture intent on ruining your phones after a few weeks or months.

Full immersion: getting cell phones wet, and then drying them out

The four phones we soaked were a Samsung Galaxy Note II, a Pantech Breakout, a Motorola Razr M, and a HTC Hero. All the models varied in size, number of buttons, and openings, but all are touch-screen phones. The four drying methods used for each phone, respectively, were a specially designed product called a Bheestie Bag ($20), a container full of silica gel packets ($10-15 for the number we used), rice ($5), and air-drying as a sort of “control” method.

After soaking each phone, we removed it, shook out as much excess water as we could, dried it off, and removed the batteries if we could. If we couldn’t remove the battery and the phone was still on, we turned it off, and then placed it in its drying environment.

For the grand reveal: one day later, the Pantech Breakout in the silica gel packets and HTC Hero drying in air were working, but the Galaxy Note II in the Bheestie Bag and the Razr M in rice were still dead.

We gave the second two phones another day to see if they would come around. The next day, the Razr M initially booted up—to a screen with an Android bot lying down with an exclamation point popping Alien-style out of its stomach. All seemed lost, but as the phone laid on the table, it began its startup routine and animations all on its own. Suspicious, indeed, but we’ll let it slide.

The Galaxy Note II, however, never really came around. After we reseated its battery and charged it a while, trying to give it a hard reset got us to the screen when the phone offered to either boot or let us install a new ROM; it would not respond to button presses beyond that. We wouldn’t consider this a knock against the Bheestie Bag, as a phone of the Galaxy Note II’s generous size has room for a lot of water, and it’s not the easiest to drain out. A couple of days later, we tried drying out the phone in a 200-degree oven; lo and behold, it powered up and ran. Given the time-lapse, we can't fully attribute this success to the oven and, given the potential to ruin your phone, this should be a last-ditch effort. But if you're desperate, it's there.

As for the rice, silica gel packets, and even plain air, all returned the phones to at least a temporary working state. We wouldn’t call the phones rock-solid from that point on, but the methods can at least get them dry enough to extract any necessary data or one last backup. If we wanted to continue to use them, we’d probably give them much longer to dry, living in fear of that moment when things start to go just a little awry—an unresponsive volume button here, a suddenly dead battery there—when we’d know exactly what event and element to blame.

Immediately powered it off, disassembled it and removed the battery. Put the phone itself in a bag full of white rice with the back taken off. Left it there for two days.

Took it out later, put it in the toaster oven for about two hours at the lowest heat setting and let it bake.

Installed a new battery and it powered on and works like nothing ever happened. There was some residual moisture between the screen and the front glass that made the display look a little wonky but after about two weeks it went away. Phone still functions normally.

We've had people at work bring in two-way radios they've dunked, usually a long bath in electronics-grade isopropyl alcohol (99%+) and the toaster oven works on them. Except for the ones the wastewater treatment people have dropped in "product" as they go straight to the landfill. Eww.

138 Reader Comments

I took an aquarium pump and pumped the air through a Dri-Rite canister (a really good dessicant). The output of the canister I put into a 1/8" tube. I stuck that tube into the headphone jack and let it run for several hours.

The first pass resulted in water spots on the back side of the screen. I repeated the process after dunking her phone in distilled water and everything was perfect.

I'd be disinclined to try a solvent (like Isopropanol or Ethanol), or a strong vacuum because I don't know how various components and materials would respond.

When possible, I pull the battery ASAP. If I have any questions about the purity of the water (salt water, muddy puddle, toilet) I'll actually rinse the electronics with distilled or deionized water (thought I've never done this with something with an LCD display). For drying, I usually use a warm oven.

In college I had a short temp job at Evans & Sutherland rinsing off boards and housings from graphics hardware that had been the victim of flood runoff.

From an engineering/scientific perspective, probably the most effective way to dry a phone under such situations is in a vacuum. So, someone should try designing a decent (inexpensive) vacuum dryer for small electronic devices. I'd pay $50-100 USD for one. It should work for cell phones, bluetooth headsets, wifi and usb dongles, etc. As the air is sucked out, the water evaporates and is also removed from the system. Just remember to let the device warm up to room temperature again before using it as vacuum drying will drop the temperature to sub-zero quite easily.

When you said that, all I could think about were those vacuum sealed bags for clothes storage that were on those infomercials a few years ago. I wonder if that would work? I mean it would be misusing a lot of space for just a phone, but it's air tight and already available (all for just 19.95!).

A few caveats: we used four different phones, one for each drying environment we tested. Obviously, different body designs will take on water differently, but we submerged each one until all the air had appeared to escape from the interior. Likewise, different designs may dry out differently, and water may have an easier time clinging to some nooks and crannies.

Why? This makes your entire experiment useless, since we can't actually draw any conclusions from it..

Ugh!If we have different phones, what kind of scientific result can we possibly get? This is not semi-scientific, this is just unscientific! It is some trial and error, nothing more.That doesn't mean the whole test is useless. As basically anything works if given enough time, we can at least rule out that e.g. rice is going to never work, since it did on at least one occasion. This is on the level of practice and crafts and has nothing to do with science, though.

It bugs me that Ars somehow slaps the term "science" on that. It even bugged me when the slip 'n slide test for that water repellent coating was introduced with it "being done for science", but there it was at least far from close to be taken serious.

About the actual drying: someone earlier mentioned the crystal style cat litter. It's dead cheap and basically pretty dry silica. That stuff takes in an enormous amount of water and even warms up doing so. It can be regenerated by simply heating it, iirc, around 160C where it steams off the water bound in it.If you want to make the process more intensive, add a fan to the drying environment and raise the temperature slightly. Having a lot of air movement will for one keep the air outside the phone extremely dry. Especially in the beginning of the process it helps a lot if the air diffusing into the housing is more dry. In addition, even when not pointing the fan towards any of the phones openings you'll likely have a higher air exchange rate in the inside.The temperature part is pretty obvious, I guess.

The proposed method of bathing the phone in ethanol or isopropanol is good, but I would keep the phone submerged only for a very short amount of time. There are some adhesives that are affected by either of the two. And besides pushing out the water, the added benefit is pushing out dirt, salts, etc., which is really important in real life water accidents.

Also, once the phone got wet, don't switch it on and try to pull the battery as fast as possible if it is removable. The combination of certain salts, water and electricity is able to corrode things in no time and even if it does not lead to direct failure, there is a high chance of reduced life time through this.

Rubberman has the right solution in the wrong paradigm. The best way to dry out a cell phone is to soak it in an ethanol bath for a few minutes. Water and ethanol dissolve easily in one another so the ethanol dissolves the water out of the phone quite easily. Then you take it out and let it air dry which it will do quite quickly because ethanol has a much lower boiling temperature than water. Rubberman wants to use a vacuum to lower the boiling temp of water. But that's way overkill. Just replace the water with ethanol which already has a low boiling temp.

EDIT: Yes I understand that most people don't actually have access to laboratory grade ethanol.

I just wanted to add that absolute ethanol (> 99.8% purity) is tough to get without an institutional affiliation. However, 95% purity should adequately do the job and is much more straightforward to obtain for the average consumer.

There is one more way to dry an electronic device (from water). Submerge it in high-purity liquid which is also highly miscible in water and safe for electronics, for example isopropyl alcohol (IPA). Volume of water left inside the device will promptly dissolve in the volume of the liquid, especially if you give it a good shake and leave it for while (or even change the liquid). It may also be able to clean residue brought by water (if it wasn't pure). When you eventually remove the device from IPA, it will dry very, very fast.

The downside is that it might damage the glue used in the device or get inside LCD screen, so this is really a method for saving a motherboard of a device rather then the full device. But when it works, it works brilliantly. I used it once to save earphones put through the washing machine, to very good effect.

So, you used a different drying method for each phone. This means your results are completely confounded, and you therefore have _no_ information about which drying method is better _or_ about which phones are better able to survive immersion. What moron set up your test, and what is this pointless exercise doing on a supposedly technical site?

If dropping a phone in water is a significant risk, buy a waterproof phone. Pretty easy to find these days. I realized that I do have a tendency to drop devices outdoors in arbitrary weather myself, and thus I made toughness the first priority when I got a new phone. Happy with that choice so far, having had at least one otherwise potentially fatal accident in less than a month.

And waterproof phones open up for all kinds of fun jokes to. People jump when you accidentally drop in a glass or use it for underwater photography. Even though a touch-screen controlled camera like on my Xperia V really works very poorly under water.

There's also the option of water-proof cases. Though, that still comes back to the decision of which phone to buy, since many phones don't have such cases available. Two I've seen are Lifeproof's cases for iPhones, and the Seidio OBEX cases for the SGS3 and iPhone 5. I can't vouch for the effectiveness of either, having a Galaxy Nexus.

Sorry, but as much as I love ARStechnica, this is about as conclusive as determining the rotational speed of the planet Venus by observing the length of time it takes the average male Dung Beetle of Madagascar to mate. Please warn us of fluff articles in the intro or cease this and desist this quasi science stuff. It's no wonder half the people in the U.S think science is all make believe.

Rubberman has the right solution in the wrong paradigm. The best way to dry out a cell phone is to soak it in an ethanol bath for a few minutes. Water and ethanol dissolve easily in one another so the ethanol dissolves the water out of the phone quite easily. Then you take it out and let it air dry which it will do quite quickly because ethanol has a much lower boiling temperature than water. Rubberman wants to use a vacuum to lower the boiling temp of water. But that's way overkill. Just replace the water with ethanol which already has a low boiling temp.

EDIT: Yes I understand that most people don't actually have access to laboratory grade ethanol.

I just wanted to add that absolute ethanol (> 99.8% purity) is tough to get without an institutional affiliation. However, 95% purity should adequately do the job and is much more straightforward to obtain for the average consumer.

If you have a Frys Electronics, they stock high purity IPA. I use it for cleaning optical filters (check with manufacturer please), removing flux, etc. I'm not next to the bottle at the moment, but it is probably better than 99%.

I'm inclined to go with the toaster oven. There is nothing like a little heat to get rid of water.

The iphone, having a captive battery and few sockets (all the things that make it suck), is probably great for water resistance. I would absolutely remove the battery before heating it up!

Nobody mentioned this, but most phones have an element to detect if they got flooded inside. This is to void warranty claims.

Given that there more iPhones sold than any of those models, why didnt you test an iPhone?

Apple is lawsuit prone. If there is a possibility of Apple not looking good, it is best to avoid that situation. Remember, this is a company that arranged a police raid of a blogger's house because he bought a lost phone.

I work for a company that repairs industrial electronics. We routinely clean boards in a sink and "bake" them in an oven at 120 deg. for a few hours. We use a temperature control, but in a home environment a "warming" mode would work. We also have an old computer fan in there to mix the air around. The ideal situation if a phone is wet is to open it up (even just slightly) and stick it in an oven, for a few hours on warm, with a desk fan in there.

I once got a panic call from a friend of my Girlfriend - she had dropped her phone in water. I told her to put it in a baggie with rice and bring it over. A day later she showed up - the phone was in the baggie, and the baggie, water and all was submerged in the rice. She had removed the battery though.

I removed it, used a wet vac to suck as much water out as I could, and submerged it in rice. I waited 2 days before trying it - amazingly it worked. This was an older Nokia candy bar style phone.

I dislocated my dominate shoulder a couple of weeks ago, so my right arm was in a sling and I was learning to use my left hand to do just about everything. At work lets just say I was emptying something of water, and since this takes a while I took out my phone to look at for a moment with my left hand. Which at that time I wasn't as proficient with obviously, and my phone the Nexus 4 tumbled to my horror into the sink I was emptying in. Sunk down to the bottom and stayed there for a moment, I reached down and grabbed it. Turned it off right away, and left it off for a couple of hours to dry as I still had work to do.

Almost three weeks later there have been no negative effects at all to my phone, I've read up on how the microphone stops working on the Nexus 4 after water damage and drying it out but everything seems to be working exactly as it was before. Suffice to say I've learned my lesson, keep the damn thing away from water as much as possible and am glad that I was damn lucky.

As others have already noted, it's important to clean out any electronics as well as drying them. Residual salts and other deposits will stop them working properly even if there's no moisture. I've rescued a few dead appliances by simply cleaning the circuit boards. I have a few digital thermometers that I use for cooking and they stop working every few months, the circuit boards have a clearly visible film on them which I clean off and then they start working again. I guess it's something that goes with using an appliance in a hot moist salty environment and maybe if I had more expensive thermometers they'd be sealed better. But I remember getting a PDA for free back when they cost a few hundred dollars because it had fallen into a swimming pool and stopped working. All it needed was cleaning the residue and some rust off the circuit board and it came back to life. Fwiw I use isopropyl alcohol simply because I have it, but household methylated spirits or whatever it's called in other parts of the world does the same job.The vacuum idea is novel but you'd need a serious chamber vacuum machine for it to work, even a household foodsaver won't make much difference, but if anyone has a foodsaver with the vacuum it would be worth a shot. But a friendly butcher might be intrigued enough to put a wet phone in theirs just to see what happens!

Use a hair-dryer. Modulate the air current so the phone doesn't get too hot to touch. You don't have to wait forever. Fifteen minutes is enough. I've fixed a number of phones this way, including the Galaxy S I had in my pocket when I walked into a lake.

Mate of mine lost his Huawei smartphone clubbing, well, so he thought.

Turns out he had dropped it in the snow in the parking lot, and I found it when it thawed 3 days later. The phone was still turned on, but clearly not happy as the display wasn´t reacting to touch. Though once it had dried out, simply in a warm room, it worked fine again.

I've noticed those same problems with wet phones that were air or gentle heat dried also though. It's possible that it's the ethanol, but I wouldn't expect ethanol to dissolve adhesives much better than water does. Definitely if you tried something like acetone you'd melt a good portion of what's inside the phone. I don't know for sure but I'd expect that dissolved minerals in the water got deposited on the thin speaker membranes and diffuser.

Ethanol dissolves adhesives MUCH better than water does because most adhesives are non-polar substances. IPA is gentler than ethanol. Put acetone on your phone it would almost certainly melt any of the plastic.

But yeah, if you want to clean up most adhesives, IPA and ethanol work wonders. Acetone is better still, but only if you use it on something that it won't completely destroy.

Moving air is going to draw away far more moisture than letting the phone sit. Hot, dry moving air would be even more effective.

Mass transport and raising the vapor pressure of water, instead of bogus physics! If a device can't be opened and blotted dry, the most effective drying method is to place it over a heat vent, near a window exposed to direct sun, or in a low temperature oven with the door open. Desiccants are less effective than dry air. Vacuum is ineffective without added heat and a place for the water vapor to go.

Put acetone on your phone it would almost certainly melt any of the plastic.

As an example of this, I splashed acetone on my keyboard once and, in the few seconds it took to pull the batteries and rinse it off, it had already eaten the faces off several plastic keycaps and deformed another cap so much that it the key longer worked reliably.

While not a big problem, solvents like acetone and alcohol may also damage or remove smartphone screen glass coatings.

I have found rice and silica to be nearly equally effective in drying things out. Rice is more abundant to find.

Long grain or wild?

I am pretty sure your comment was a joke, but I have a serious answer for you LOL.

I eat Rico brand rice so that's what I use. I will not eat it if I am using it to dry out a soaked device. Probably a more important factor to consider is the water to rice ratio in the directions. Rico is 2 parts water to one part rice. I am sure there are other brands that have a higher ratios. Overall rice is very moisture absorbent, so it really doesn't matter a whole lot which one you use.

I eat Rico brand rice so that's what I use. I will not eat it if I am using it to dry out a soaked device. Probably a more important factor to consider is the water to rice ratio in the directions. Rico is 2 parts water to one part rice. I am sure there are other brands that have a higher ratios. Overall rice is very moisture absorbent, so it really doesn't matter a whole lot which one you use.

It would stand to reason that instant rice would be more effective. The ratio of water to rice isn't important - you're not completely saturating the rice. What you want is something that more readily absorbs small amounts of moisture. Instant rice is made to absorb water more quickly, so I would think it'd be a better desiccant.

Overall though, I wouldn't think rice would be effective. We keep rice in semi-open cardboard boxes and burlap sacks, and they're not absorbing moisture from the air. And, when you put the phone in a jar of anything, you're eliminating any convection that could be carrying moisture away.

iPhone 3G: 5 days after receiving it as a gift. Dropped in the toilet. Tried to dry it herself with a blow dryer - attempted to keep on using it throughout the day. By the time I got home from work, there was nothing to be done for it.

Replacement iPhone 3G (Purchased at full price): Dropped in a bathtub a couple of months after receiving it. Apparently she listened to my previous lecture (I was not as kind as I should have been), and immediately powered the device off (can't pull the battery out of an iPhone) and put it in a bowl of instant rice. We left it there for 4 days before I tried turning it on again. It worked for the remainder of our service contract... mostly.

iPhone 4: 2 weeks after receiving it. dropped face down on concrete. Screen shattered. Managed to replace the screen with a repair kit acquired on ebay (despite my shaky hands). This phone was later dropped in water and dried in the same manner as the 3G.

Her current phone is a Samsung Rugby Pro (I insisted on this over the S3). I understand it's ruggedized, but I have confidence my wife will find a way to break it.

I will note that I have never destroyed one of my smartphones. I understand that karma now dictates that I will accidently destroy my S3 in spectacular fashion in the near future.

Overall though, I wouldn't think rice would be effective. We keep rice in semi-open cardboard boxes and burlap sacks, and they're not absorbing moisture from the air. And, when you put the phone in a jar of anything, you're eliminating any convection that could be carrying moisture away.

This wasn't a very fair test. You should have tested all four phones with all four drying methods, or just stuck to a single phone; as designed, you're not really testing the different drying methods against each other, and you're not really testing the different phones against each other.

For you to do it this way and call air "the control" is just a bit silly. (Also, air drying isn't the control, the control is keeping the phone wet on purpose, or better yet comparing against an unmoistened phone.)